The Next Decade of Open Sharing: Reaching One Billion Minds

Human potential is universal; opportunity is not. MIT OpenCourseWare began with the vision that the teaching tools of the world's top learning institutions should be freely available to all humanity: to study, to share, to build upon.

In our first 10 years, MIT has been delivering on that vision. We've reached 100 million individuals to date, people with the ideas, talents and motivation to have enormous impact on their communities, given the opportunity to do so.

MIT's goal for the next decade is to increase our reach ten-fold: to reach a billion minds. We aspire by 2021 to make open educational resources like MIT OpenCourseWare the tools to bridge the global gap between human potential and opportunity, so that motivated people everywhere can improve their lives and change the world.

The Plan

How will we do this? First and foremost, we’ll continue to improve the depth and quality of our core publication, and to improve our site. In addition, we’ve identified four focus areas with the potential to help us reach our goal:

Reaching key audiences - For more people to get the most out of OCW, we have to put more in. We'll customize OCW to meet the needs of people across a wide range of cultures and backgrounds.

Creating communities of open learning - We'll create an ecosystem for open learning that goes beyond content. Over the next decade, we'll take advantage of new technologies to ensure people can interact around OCW, increasing their understanding of the material.

Empowering educators worldwide - Educators are a key multiplier for us. By bringing OCW materials into their classrooms, they share our content with millions. We will strive to provide educators everywhere with the tools they need to serve these students.

Next Decade Alliance

OCW's Next Decade Initiatives are supported by our Next Decade Alliance sponsors.